A Rumour That Refuses to Die
As Canada prepares to co-host the 2026 FIFA World Cup, a strange story has taken root in British Columbia — and it's proving surprisingly hard to uproot.
The claim: that the City of Vancouver is quietly paying unhoused residents and loading them onto buses bound for communities across B.C., including Prince George, in a bid to clean up the city's image before the international spotlight arrives this summer.
The reality, according to officials in both cities: it isn't happening.
Officials Forced to Respond
The rumour has spread so widely in Prince George that the city itself, along with multiple city councillors, felt compelled to issue public statements denying it.
Prince George councillors took the unusual step of directly addressing the claim after residents began raising concerns about an apparent influx of unhoused individuals in the community. The fear was that Vancouver — under pressure to present a polished face for the World Cup — was essentially offloading its homelessness crisis onto smaller B.C. cities.
Vancouver officials have also denied the allegations, with no evidence emerging to support the claim that any coordinated busing or payment program exists.
Why the Rumour Has Legs
The persistence of the story isn't entirely surprising. Cities preparing to host major international sporting events have a documented history of scrutinizing — and sometimes displacing — their unhoused populations. Reports of similar practices surfaced ahead of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, the 2015 Pan American Games in Toronto, and numerous other global events.
That historical context, combined with genuine concerns about how Canadian host cities will handle visible homelessness during the World Cup, has made the Prince George rumour feel plausible to many people, even without hard evidence.
Canada is co-hosting the 2026 World Cup alongside the United States and Mexico. Vancouver is one of the Canadian host cities, along with Toronto.
A Bigger Conversation About Hosting Costs
Whether or not the busing rumour is true, it has sparked a legitimate public conversation about what it means for a Canadian city to host a mega-event — and who bears the cost.
Advocates for unhoused communities have long argued that major sporting events create pressure on cities to make homelessness less visible rather than less prevalent. The distinction matters: temporary displacement doesn't solve housing precarity, it just moves it.
For Prince George residents who believed the rumour, the underlying anxiety was real — a sense that their community could become a pressure valve for a larger city's optics problem. That anxiety points to genuine tensions in how homelessness, housing policy, and international spectacle intersect in Canada right now.
What Comes Next
With the World Cup less than a year away, expect the scrutiny of how host cities treat their unhoused populations to intensify. Advocacy groups across B.C. and Ontario are already watching closely.
For now, Prince George and Vancouver are asking the public to rely on official sources — and to think critically before sharing stories that, however believable, haven't been verified.
Source: CBC News British Columbia. Read the original report at cbc.ca.
